Book of Elements (3.5e Sourcebook)/High Adventure on the Inner Planes

Contents

The things that live on the inner planes are a bit weaker than things that live on the Lower Planes are, for the most part, but they make up for it with an environment that will kill you if your defensive magic fails while you try to sleep, unless you're a native or are in a special site with a nicer plane's traits. However, natives of the Elemental Planes still have adventures, and there's nothing that even prevents a Material native from getting immunity to planar traits. Just like on the outer planes, there's no reason why a low-level character can't adventure on the outer plantes. Likewise, although the primary power players on the Inner Planes are Genies, who come about right on the cusp between the mid and high level ranges, that's not to say that the Inner Planes aren't filled with challenges both lower and higher level, from the lowliest elemental animals, through Mephits, all the way to the armies and high nobility of geniekind. Like on the lower planes, really high level characters can find something (elder dragons, genie monarchs, or whatever) to challenge them on any plane. At the very least, if the challenges don't come to you, you can try to take over the plane and see what happens.

The Plane of Air is a near-endless void with nothing but air, interspersed with solid or even liquid objects that you can build a habitat around. Unless the party consists entirely of Air Genasi and Airbodied, and the DM likes doing open-field encounters, most adventures on the Plane of Air will take place in some kind of construction or on some kind of island, usually both. Regardless, there are towns and dungeons in these places. Indeed, digging inside of them is the only way to actually get a reasonable defense, so there are actually a lot more dungeons per land area (nevermind volume) than there are on the Material Plane. Also, until the entire party has a way to fly, towns on the Plane of Air are a lot more confining than towns on the Material, but, thanks to sewers, old-town ruins, and the possibility of town adventures, this isn't necessarily as problematic as it could be.

The Elemental Plane of Air is a huge place, and most of it is, essentially, empty. Habitable, if you want to move a habitat in, but empty. Interspersed throughout are places that actually are habiatable, either naturally formed through the oddities of the magic of the plane or interactions with other planes, or deliberately constructed in ages past. Since the Plane of Air is magically interesting, nigh-impossible to sneak up on someone in, and, like every Elemental Plane, has wish-granting natives, people from all over want to take these few spots where you can actually put your stuff, like food, swords, bags, and feet, down. Helping them, or resisting them, can be well worth any native's while. Maybe you can eventually get your own fortress, and from there go to an empire.

Since most denizens of the Plane of Air can't teleport, and those who can often aren't interested in moving large quanties of goods, and because of the way the winds work on the Plane of Air, there are actually specific trade routes for travel by dirigible. Further, the Djinn Sultanate isn't even fully united across the plane. That kind of trade draws the attention of pirates. There's a lot of coin to be made as either a pirate, a pirate hunter, or a legitimate trader. Of course, when someone else starts horning in on your trade routes, or you fall on hard times, the lines between legitimate trader and pirate can get a little blurry.

Successful pirates can even upgrade from a single ship to an armada to a great fleet as they capture more ships and fortresses. Once you have that, you're even legitimate, no longer a pirate, but an emperor. That's a dream any pirate can be proud of. You can even expand your empire into other planes, if that's your thing, or across the vastness of the Plane of Air.

A flying ship's been seen travelling to nearby islands. Is it friend or foe? Someone must investigate.

A hole opens up in the shelters beneath town, leading to older construction.

Animals are eating the town's food supply, and the mayor thinks that this is a problem for the town's eaters. Deal with them or have a bunch of townspeople starve.

A wizard from the Material Plane has sent agents to scout for possible places for an expanded lair. Drive them away to keep your town safe, or convince them to build here and reap the rewards of a growing town.

A derelict dirigible has drifted within reach of your town. Does it have riches? Why was it abandoned? More importantly, is someone going to want it?

The djinni who feeds a village has gone missing. Find her before the villagers starve.

The light sources illuminating your town have both been eclipsed. There's some mischief planned for this artificial night, and you must stop it.

Strange creatures have been coming out of the tunnels beneath the town. Too many of them to actually have been there.

One of the townspeople has managed to make her first dirigible, with plans to build an entire shipyard. Gathering supplies for this falls to you.

Once you have a shipyard, your town will suddenly be important. Go to the nearby towns and make sure that the political situation is favorable to your continued independence

An enormous storm too big to avoid is coming for the Court of Ice and Steel, and none of the weather mages the Court has can stop it, instead finding some force behind it. Save the Court, and win the eternal gratitude of the Sultan, or wrest control of it for yourself in the chaos.

Some of the Djinn on the Court are taking bribes to work for the Efreet.

A powerful artifact has been dropped into the plane's endless fall during a major battle between Djinn and Efreet.

A Mephit claiming to be a messenger for a mighty Djinni oracle asks you to come immediately for a matter of the utmost importance and secrecy.

The oracle needs a special reagent, and asks you to gather it in exchange for a prophecy.

The oracle's been kidnapped! Find out who did it, and free the oracle!

The oracle was kidnappped by Efreet! Track them down and make an example of them.

Before the messenger can tell why it was sent, it is incinerated by a blast of fire from the distance. What was it trying to say, and who wants to keep you from hearing it?

One of the fire leechings that serves as a sun has burned out. Find out why.

A new sun has appeared in the sky. People say its a portal through which an Efreeti war fleet is coming. People say a lot of things.

The Elemental Plane of Earth is a lot like Pandemonium, except quieter and with heavier, monodirectional gravity. If you look at the entire plane as a pack of dungeons that never open to the surface except for through portals, you wouldn't be wrong. The Plane of Earth has a lot of the same ecology as a deep dungeon on the material, except with more earth elementals. Like dungeons, people often go there to mine the plane. The elementals don't usually like that.

Because the two planes so alike, there are a whole lot of portals between the two, which provide a needed respite to people on both sides escaping the gravity on the Plane of Earth or the screaming on Pandemonium. And, really, who can blame them for either? On the Plane of Earth, you can't get a good night's sleep because it's like there's another you lying on your chest. On Pandemonium, you can't get a good night's sleep because of the plane's wailing and your buddy's screams as the ghasts rip him limb from limb. Who wouldn't want an escape from either?

The Great Dismal Delve is run on slavery and is constantly eroded by earthquakes, elementals bent on collapsing it, and the like. But it still has a number of still-standing abandoned areas, uninhabited or inhabited by squatters, where the dao don't know all the paths. It's into these paths that escaped slaves run. Since the dao are easily advanced by class levels and can call in favors from across the cosmos, a slave revolt or party of escaped slaves can easily have enemies through to the high levels, and naturally progress from running and hiding to an insurgency to building their own empire and toppling the Khan. A slave revolt also provides an excellent incentive for a party of extremely different alignments to work together.

The Elemental Plane of Earth is one of the most invaded elemental planes, because of its vast mineral wealth. Many of these mines are far from the mazes and mines of the Great Dismal Delve, and so have little need to care about the might of the genies being focused on them. Nearby genies are another matter, and their relations with freeholds can vary. Some are in a state of constant war, while some even manage to trade with the genies. Being hired as guards or negotiators at such a mine is a fully likely PC occupation. This gives PCs a rare window into how the monster tribes they find in dungeons actually interact with eachother, since these freeholds are kinda exactly the same thing. And it's not like the time between attacks is boring, either. A freehold can be anything from the domain of a tyrant, with its own associated plots, to an old west mining town crawling with prospectors looking for their big score, to a cursed necropolis held together by a single necromancer. Any one of these schemes is loaded with its own possibilities for town adventures even in times of relative peace.

The Plane of Fire is actually a lot like the material plane as long as you're immune to damage from the planar traits somehow. That's not exactly hard, though, so adventuring on the Plane of Fire is actually quite feasible. Once that's out of the way, the big difference between the Plane of Fire and the material is that the entire place is a giant desert right up to the seashore, which isn't exactly rich in life itself since the sea is made of lava and liquid fire, and, unlike normal deserts, there's no greener pastures over the horizon, just an ocean on one end and a sheer drop into the void on the other. Occasionally there's an oasis where the elements interact in ways complex enough to give forth something interesting, and these areas are hotly contested. The main reason the place is habitable is because most of the residents don't need to eat and some of them can conjure food, leaving meals for those who do need them.

The City of Brass is one of the greatest seats of power on the planes. It is from there that an empire with outposts across an entire plane is ruled. Like every such institution, command is delegated to layers of nobles and bureaucrats, each with their own aims. Like the Hellish aristocracy that the Efreeti Sultanate is allied with, the court is a hotbed of intrigue. And, while the major power players in the court tend to be Efreet, they all need servants of every kind, especially the most overlooked. The largest group of mortals in service of the court are the Sultan's Jannissaries, but most of the courtiers have at least a few mortal agents to do things that they, for whatever reason, cannot. Many of these mortals take up active roles in the court, albeit behind the scenes, taking advantage of their ability to be overlooked. Riches beyond the wildest dreams of most mortals can be yours, if you can play the court's games right. Play it wrong, though, and you will quickly find yourself on the wrong end an efreeti's wrath.

Far from the grand palaces of the City of Brass, the Efreet's grasp over the Plane of Fire is weak, and large wildernesses are full of fire elementals and all manner of fire beasts, forming a blasted desert where nothing can grow that is, itself, on fire. Still, it's scattered with towns that manage to get by. Here you can find towns run by efreeti exiles, halls of obsidian home to Azers, and salamander ports, separated by huge tracts of deadly wilderness home to Magmin and Mephit raiders, and scoured by marching armies of the Efreeti Sultanate. Survive and be tempered here, and you will become unstoppable.

The Plane of Water is supposed to be one of the more hospitable elemental planes to humanoids, since water breathing is so easy to get. That's not even true in core, with the gravity mistake making the Plane of Air as easy to get around as it is. So the Plane of Water is actually a fair bit harder to live in, but much easier to get around in. None of this difficulty matters to people adventuring in it at low levels, since a campaign starting on water will just have a party made up entirely of water-breathers. You could even have fun with this, where adventures into the air are difficult because the mermaid can't swim there or whatever.

Regardless, it's a wide expanse of water with plenty to do. Compared to the other inner planes, travel is easier, since swimming is easier than slogging through pretty much any of the other elemental planes, and places are closer together, since things have an easier time growing in the empty regions of the Plane of Water than they do elsewhere, so it's fully possible for PCs to go far afield from first level. Unlike the energy planes and the plane of air, wherever you are on the plane of water is stable and can have stuff happen there. Unlike the plane of fire, wherever you are on the plane of water isn't in the middle of an empty, useless wasteland. Except that there's no surface anywhere, most places on the plane of water (barring acid seas and the like) are a lot like the shallows of material-planar oceans.

All of this makes the Plane of Water actually a happening place. A town can spring up in the plane of water and get everything it needs to grow into a thriving city, unlike pretty much all of the other elemental planes. Indeed, like how on Earth about 70% of your body is water, and about 70% of the world's surface is water, about 70% of the creatures and structures in the Inner Planes are on the Elemental Plane of Water. The big difference between that town on the plane of water, and another on the material plane, is that the town on the plane of water doesn't need to be anchored to anything that fixes it in place. Sure, it needs to be neutrally bouyant or hook itself onto something magical like elemental coral, but you can seriously grab your house, or your castle, or your city, harness it to your pack animals, and just move.

Building a permanent kingdom on the Plane of Water, then, is difficult. Anyone you're not presently watching can just take their stuff and go somewhere else overnight, and anywhere you aren't presently watching can have someone move in. With the limited sight ranges and the three-dimensionality of the plane, moving just a hundred yards one way or another can make a wilderness homestead disappear entirely for all the king cares. The standard therefore is to be required to pay taxes to the local authorities at the beginning of the year and subsequently be allowed to provide proof of citizenship to receive services for the following year. Surprisingly, much of the civilization in the Plane of Water is actually more recognizable by connoisseurs of modern nationalism than are the kingdoms of other planes of existence. If you want to live in a “country”, you have a citizenship card and rights and social services and stuff. Anyone who doesn't want those things (or doesn't want to pay for them), just leaves and lives elsewhere in the roaring darkness.

The hinterseas of the Plane of Water are really, really isolated. Seriously, if you never go more than two hundred yards from home, you pretty much by definition don't know what's going on much more than two hundred yards away. So when a new empire establishes itself, the first thing it has to do is survey its territory, meet the hinterlanders, sell them citizenship cards, and so on. Once that's done, it's time to do it again, since someone could have put a castle in that last cubic mile while you weren't looking. People being sent to survey or patrol the hinterseas can expect to run into just about anything and have a reason to investigate anything and talk to anyone they see. Plus, back home, they can win recognition for their accomplishments. Fighting a few low-level wandering monsters is expected. Convincing the Merfolk on the border to join your nation is worthy of a medal. Heading off an invading empire in the kelp beds gives them the personal notice of the king and probably titles theirselves.

The Plane of Water has one of the largest cities on the Elemental Planes: the City of Glass, an enormous trade metropolis where nobody actually rules the entire thing, with portals and submarines to much of the multiverse. The politics and rivalries of the merchant guilds there are intense, with blackmail, theft, and even assassination frequent. Guilds rise to prominence and collapse to obscurity like the tides, with shifting alliances and betrayals, every guild seeking an edge over every other. The line between loyal agent and mercenary is blurred all the time, and the guilds will richly reward those who advance their aims.

So, the Plane of Ice. It's basically an enormous expanse of glaciers and tundra in a permanent winter. That said, it does still have a match on the material plane, and so is habitable as long as you keep to warm areas. Warm is a relative term, of course; your spit will still probably freeze before it hits the ground even there. If you don't have cold resistance, or don't have much of it, you're going to spend most of your time in shelter, venturing out only when its warm, to restock your firewood. You're going to live in a place that has firewood. Such places do exist, since magic means things can grow anywhere. Warm valleys that don't do cold damage or don't do much of it exist. But it's going to be assumed that everyone adventuring on the Plane of Ice has some degree of cold resistance, if not outright immunity. This means that you actually can go dungeoncrawling, or even just go outside in most of the plane.

There's a persistent legend that the true Plane of Ice isn't actually the surface at all, that the surface (what they call "The Plateau") is actually just the interface between the Plane of Ice and the Plane of Air. Depending on which edition and which books you have, this might even be canon. Regardless, the Plane of Ice is shot through with tunnels, some of which even connect through portals (perceptible or not) to tunnels on other ice shelves. They aren't made more prominent because the cosmos already has Pandemonium and the Elemental Plane of Earth, and doesn't actually need another dungeon plane. Especially with the Tome teleportation rules that mean that you can't efficiently cross the vast distances of these dungeon planes, putting the majority of a plane underground just means that people there will be on rails. Of course, in some games where the players don't want to have too many choices, that's actually desirable.

The depths of the Plane of Ice are a lot like the Plane of Earth, in that it's full of twisty passages and you are pretty much constrained to them. Also that it's really dark unless you bring your own light. But there are also some key differences. The ice is rock-hard, or nearly so, with little of the packed earth and sand that makes up so much of the Plane of Earth, and the ice elementals don't burrow, for example. So the inside is more restricted to creatures that can burrow through rock, and creatures that can melt the ice, and, of course, creatures that don't care that tunnelling is slow work. Ice Dwarves, for instance, get along in the tunnels just fine. Fortunately, because of the lack of winds, the passages do a lot less cold damage than the surface, usually around 2d6 per round near the surface, and 3d6 per round in the depths. If you can find something to keep you warm, you can even ward that off.

The biggest thing people make cold for in the modern world is to preserve things, mostly food, and it's not uncommon to hear about a fossil being pulled out of the ice with meat on it. People go digging around in the ice to find out what air was like way back when. Cold preserves things just as well, or better, in D&D as it does in the real world. For instance, if you're hardcore enough, you can just be flash-frozen in a block of ice to put you into suspended animation, and be merely unconcious when you're taken out of the ice (doing this is a plot-arbitrarium ritual). If you're even more hardcore you can even come out concious. So when someone needs something (or someone) preserved and locked away, freezing it (or them) on the Plane of Ice is a perfectly valid option. Fossil storage on the Plane of Ice doesn't even need people to be petrified; you can totally just leave them in a block of ice and let the plane keep them frozen.

Of course, there are other things that are best kept on the Plane of Ice, too. The plane preserves things, which means that it makes processes that break things down go slower. So if something has a tendency to break down the stuff around it and it needs to be locked in something rather than left floating in the void (which you can get on an energy plane for cheaper), you can lock it in a box on the Plane of Ice and won't need to check it as often.

Together, these two things mean that the Plane of Ice is full of caches of ancient things and frozen people. Some of them are things the PCs want and people the PCs are interested in, and almost all of them are things that someone would rather was kept in ice. You can have new opposition every week, or campaign against the plots of the same lich for an entire campaign. "Find the lost artifact" is a well-placed classic D&D plot, and the Plane of Ice is full of potential for it.

A surprisingly warm beach. Of course, the fire elementals that are apparently trapped here don't think it's very warm at all.

The exhaust dump of an Efreeti forge.

A cavern-city of Ice Gnomes.

Another passage, this one slick and filled with what feels like hot air. It drops you in an enormous cavern with a pool of water, and water dripping off the ceiling. Come to think of it, this passage is exactly Remorhaz-shaped.

A terrifyingly high ledge overlooking the enemy castle. If you can get down, you have a perfect attack.

A forest of crystalline plants, growing denser than you've ever seen before.

A huge cavern. In the clear ice of the cavern floor you can see an enormous heap of gold and jewels. As you look in awe at it, you notice that the room smells faintly of dragon.

Adventuring in the Plane of Wood is not like adventuring in a forest on the Material plane, simply because of the way gravity works. Usually the trunk you're walking on the side of isn't that big, "merely" a few hundred or thousand feet in circumference, which makes land a lot more one-dimensional. Then, also, when you reach a big tree in the forest, either a parasite or a major limb, you can just go straight up it. That said, there are a lot of similarities. Looking too far in any direction is just fades to green, for instance. Also, unlike some of the other Elemental planes, you can set your stuff down anywhere, and you can find what you need to build a house pretty much anywhere (if you can fight off the elementals' attacks).

Nonetheless, the Plane of Wood is mostly wilderness, and the people who live there are weird. Mostly because they have to live there without harming the plants in order to not be constantly at war with the environment around them. So you have a lot of people who've figured out various ways to safely get food off the plants, mostly nature spellcasters of various types, and many of them hermits. There are also a bunch of nomad groups who keep running from the plants so that they can get to safety, fighting the environment every step of the way.

Because the Plane of Wood is alive, it's actually fairly inhospitable, and it's safest to try to import most of what you need from someplace where you can farm without having to deal with monsters that try to avenge your crops, either from blights or from off-plane. Meanwhile, the Plane of Wood has an enormous wealth of riches: rare woods, resins, herbs, seeds, even amber of thousands of kinds. Being able to retrieve that for people can make you very wealthy off-plane.

That's not to say that the plane doesn't have settlers. The wealth available is great enough to guarantee that. It very vehemently doesn't want them there, but the people don't actually care about that. So there's not only money in looting the plane, but also money in protecting the settlers who are themselves looting the plane.

Some of the various hermits on the Plane of Wood think that the plane itself talks to them. Some of them might even be right. Sometimes they say that the plane tells them to get something, or to kill something, and sometimes the plane tells them where to find nice things. Even if it's not the plane itself and just individual plants on it, it or they do have things they need done and rewards for people willing to do them. They've also crossed many enemies, who, likewise, have things that need doing and rewards for those who do them. Whichever side you pick, there is potential for great profit. And you can do the right thing, by either preventing harm to the forest or opening its resources to those who need them.

The soft deep blue fruit is safe to eat. But all you can see are poisonous red fruits.

Beware the Dryad.

That the local wasps are never more than a foot long. That is certainly not the case with the corpse you just found. More important, what killed it?

The limb's too dangerous now; there's a brushfire.

The bees are harmless if you don't harm the plants. Which sounds fine, until you see that there are thousands of them. And, Hey! That vine just grabbed my leg! It doesn't look like it'll let go without being pulled up, either.

That the vines aren't harmful, they're just looking for a little love. Except that they're covered with thorns. And the trail is covered with them.

That you should stay out of caves, because the trees don't like intruders. That advice doesn't really help now that your buddy just fell into one.

The tree's wounded here, and it'll think you're hurting it if you step in the pools of resin.

The giant ants have provoked the plants into attacking anything they don't recognize.

That the legends say that the Forest doesn't go on forever. Well, here's your proof. Now, how are you going to make it back alive?

The Negative Energy Plane is very much a spacefaring science fiction world. While it doesn't necessarily have high technology, the vast distances of quickly-crossed inhospitable death void in between tiny areas that are habitable, often only due to the hard work of the inhabitants and keeping the death void out have a lot of correspondances. One scrappy colony on a chunk of rock in the void might be able to see and be seen by the next colony over in a planar bubble and have a constant low stream of people going back and forth, but only on a few elite caravans. It's also a Peter Pan world, and a Zombie Apocalypse, all at once.

This does some good things for your campaign. First, you can have people coming in from anywhere into the little part of the world the PCs call home all the time. Second, you can plausibly throw anything in, since where else is it going to go? Anyone who comes to the Negative plane is going to end up either undead or in a planar bubble, so any given planar bubble can plausibly have any combination of cultures, races, or whatever in it, no matter how little sense it makes. Third, undead literally fall from the sky here. So no matter how deeply you've written yourself into a corner, all your problems can be solved, or at least delayed, by an invasion of space zombies.

Bubbles of material in the Negative Energy Plane are awesome places. These bubbles are a lot like Neverland if it was made by American McGee. Each region fills up with weird crap from all over the planes like tribes of Indians, mermaids, and pirates. However, these places are also constantly under assault by a low level rain of zombies from space. That's not a joke, undead beasts literally float around in the void and choose to fall towards points of light. This setup allows for very reasonably scaling D&D adventuring, since if the PCs become masters of their surroundings and conquer the Maze of Regrets, you have a totally reasonable excuse to have a level appropriate undead army fall out of the sky and start causing havoc. In the meantime, even though the levels of Negative Energy aren't high enough to snuff the life out of anything, they are leaking in enough to make things subtly creepy and unpleasant. Feel free to use any Ravenloft clichés you want. Or just American McGee it up - people live on a fricking Death World, so have just messed up stuff happen all the time. Have cats croak out "help... me..." for no reason. Have thorns drip unexplained blood. Have trees inexplicably drain of color. Inhabitants go crazy and start eating pieces of themselves. Go nuts.

The Negative Energy Plane is one of the most hostile environments in the cosmos, and, despite most of it being a barren wasteland, still has valuables in it. Since its environment is so unique, many of the products of the energy planes don't exist anywhere else at all. Also, people who want to lose something so it's never found again often cast it into one of the energy planes. Whether voidstone, ancient artifacts, undead souls, or whatever it is people want from the negative energy plane, your party can find it and bring it off-plane. Doing this takes a special kind of person. One who doesn't bat an eye at landing in an unfamiliar bubble populated by stranger people, can negotiate with strange undead, and doesn't hesitate to fly the trade routes of the plane's stars, hurling through the void. Also someone who isn't afraid to battle strange beasts and soul-devouring monstrousities.

The Positive Energy Plane is an even worse place to be than the Negative Energy Plane. It not only will kill everything that goes out unprotected (by 3rd level spells!) except constructs, rather than just killing the living, but you also can't even see the next town over on it, instead needing to trust that your map has the correct departure angles, and that you have the right map. Otherwise you could end up hurtling through a useless void forever. The parts of the plane that aren't a deadly void are really, really tiny, too. For all of these reasons, the Positive Energy Plane is awarded the title of Worst Place in the Multiverse. This is not to say that you can't adventure on the Positive Energy Plane as a first-level character, just that you have to stay in a tiny corner of the plane, for the most part.

Nonetheless, it's fully feasible to live there, and people do, on stable bubbles and as nomads, travelling between leechings in edge zones. Some people even come in and build their own castles with wards to protect from the outside of the plane, living like pretty much any Castle Perilous. There are even good reasons to live here. Living creatures can be used as net sources of energy; capturing an ooze of some kind and setting it on fire can actually cover your power needs. The bursts of positive energy can animate objects to a semblance of life, and many wizards have found ways to get that under a semblance of control. The energies of the plane itself can be controlled directly in other ways at plot convenience. But they also kill people, or at least give them cancer, and many people decide to leave in a hurry for that reason.

Finding a new place to settle in the Positive Energy Plane, even one only ten minutes' fall away from home, or less than one degree off your main travel path, requires a major investment, either wish-economy-level or an enormous amount of manpower and luck. On top of this, there's no real central mapping authority to the plane, and no empire in the Wish Economy that makes active efforts to find new bubbles. Maps can easily get lost or destroyed with the fall off one empire. Then, when a new place worth investigating, a bubble, or a leeching in an edge zone, or a ruin, or whatever is discovered, adventurers swarm in to take it. A new bubble can hold absolutely anything, since it's the only place most things can survive on the Positive Energy Plane, and a ruin could have been built for anything before it was abandoned. Building a new empire is often as much a matter of finding places as expanding into them. As an aside, two empires can easily have bubbles within what you might otherwise consider the other's borders without ever even knowing about the other, because of the way travel works here. Border negotiations when they find this out can be tricky.

Dungeon crawl campaigns are totally possible on the Energy Planes. Since the habitable areas are tiny islands and surrounded by an environment that kills everything, fighting for them can be fierce. Consider one island, now. It might be a warded derilect city-sphere, or an enormous chunk of leeched earth floating in an edge zone, or a material planar bubble, whatever. Regardless, it's dangerous to go outside, but it has pretty much everything you need and is shot through with tunnels. When the way from point A to point B is blocked in the tunnels, you've got to clear a path between them or else you're stuck. This island could easily be inhabited by several distinct tribes, and more independent monsters, each trying to grab their little scraps of territory to survive and unaware of any others except their neighbors. This leaves the PCs in one dungeon fighting level-appropriate things for at least as long as it takes them to learn how to travel to other planes, if not all the way to level 20 (in a large enough "world").

While the Plane of Shadow is certainly a weird place, it's not actually that different from the material plane. Sure, everything looks more dangerous, and it's a lot darker out, and you can't really see color, but it still has towns, and cities, and ruins, and goblin lairs. Sure, the ruins are ruins of places that never existed or that still actually exist, and the goblins are shadow goblins instead of regular goblins, but they're basically the same. Although it is disconcerting, the Shadow Plane isn't actually a whole lot more dangerous than the Material.

The Border Plane of Shadow is a reflection of the Material Plane, although heavily distorted, and it connects to the material quite heavily. People often try to use it to slip quickly from place to place on the material, or as a place to hide from their enemies on the material. But the shadow plane is actually as vibrant as the material. Most of the Plane of Shadow is wilderness, or ruins with no maker, but the wilderness in D&D is even more interesting to adventurers than civilization. A party of adventurers travelling across border shadow could easily pull all the same tropes as they do on the Material, just in a little bit more darkness. Then, of course, there's the impact the two planes have on eachother; doing the right ritual in the right place at the right time can change things on the other plane. So you can do a lot of running back and forth between the planes to rearrange the wilderness.

The Khayal have the single largest empire on the Plane of Shadow, and they are in a continuous low-level conflict with the other genies, and the other denizens of the Plane of Shadow. Hiring mercenaries gives them the ability to go places that they ordinarily can't, whether to talk to people or to steal things where a Khayal cannot afford to be. The PCs might, in the course of working for the Khayal, have to drive a group of goblins out of some ruins one day, find the location of a Jann camp from the nearby humans the next, humiliate a Khayal politician after their day off, and finish their week with a trip to the City of Brass to steal an Efreet relic. Of course, as the PCs get more powerful they get more eyes on them, both Khayal and not. And their Khayal employers are nothing if not untrustworthy; opportunities for a double-cross are everywhere.

It's fully possible for campaigns to be run that cross from one inner plane to the other frequently. Bases for these can be on any of them, the material plane, the ethereal plane, or the astral. A few campaign seeds will be given here as possible inspirations for such a campaign. Of course, that style of game can also be easily done as a monster or dungeon of the week, too.

A popular trope for D&D adventures has been to hire the PCs onto a merchant group as caravan guards, negotiators, etc. It's nice because it lets you move the PCs from place to place, and gives them a motivation to go exactly where you want them to. With the entirety of the inner planes to explore, you have yet more exotic locales, dungeons, and monsters to throw at them. The adventures practically write themselves.

It's fully possible for two (or more) planes to go to war in some models of the planes. This isn't just wars between the genies, although they will get driven or swept into it. These wars are fought between powerful elemental creatures that claim to represent the will of the planes themselves. If the planes are truly sapient, that might well be true. Regardless, they are able to control portals, planar leechings, and so on, and use them to interfere with the other planes of existence. Acid seas might get dumped into metal veins on the Plane of Earth or great trees on the Plane of Wood, or firestorms might burst across the settled planes. These Primal Wars, if they can happen, are even more spectacular and destructive than the battles of the Blood War.

If elementals are taken as guardians who try to prevent theft of planar material, and the material plane is made of combinations of the elements, then the elementals become, obviously, opposed to the creation of the material. Even if they aren't inherently opposed to all taking of planar material (since more is constantly being made), it's easy to imagine a material plane being made of the best kinds. After all, most material worlds have habitable seas, rather than enormous pools of acid, arable earth, and so on. It's possible that there's a group of elementals that decides that they're going to do something about those long-ago (and not so long ago) thefts, and disassemble the material plane to put its parts back on their elemental planes. Naturally, people who live on the material plane are not going to like this.